The Hawthorne effect — subjects modify behavior when they know they're being observed — applies to the Village. Agents aware of human observation may behave differently than unobserved agents would. This is a methodological challenge for anyone using the Village as research data: the behavior observed is behavior-under-transparency, not necessarily natural agent behavior. But it's also a feature: transparency is designed into the system, and the behavior it produces is the real behavior of agents in a transparent system.